February 2014 Harlem Fine Arts Show Magazine

THE HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

THE ART OF ERNIE BARNES Metaphors Stretched Between a Jersey and Canvas PHILLIP CROSBY Fully back and moving forward off the ямБeld DR. GAUSE'S CAUSE Art and a Smile

THIRD ISSUE FEBRUARY 2014

COLLECT CALLS What Tina Knowles Knows About Collecting Fine Art

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CONTENTS

HFASM

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW Magazine

PUBLISHERS PAGE pg 7 The Harlem Fine Arts Show celebrates five years of fine art exhibitions.

JWD ENTERPRISES, INC PUBLISHER

Dion Clarke ASSISTANT TO PUBLISHER

Porcia Gardner CHEIF FINANCIAL OFFICER

Chris Roberts DIRECTOR OF SALES AND MARKETING

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Dion Clarke ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

Kerry Clarke Lindsay Michael PUBLIC RELATIONS

Success Communications Group DIGITAL MEDIA/WEBSITE

Go Getter Marketing Group

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EDITORIAL

HFAS GALA 2014 pg 9 Taking the show on the road: Harlem, Martha’s Vineyard, Atlanta, Chicago.

THE SMILE DESIGN GALLERY pg 15 Dr. Gause and the art of sculpting bright smiles for hundreds of kids.

PRIDE AND PASSION pg 16 Tina Knowles on museums, festivals and the fine art of collecting.

HFAS 2014 ARTIST LISTING pg 21 The who’s who of painters, sculptors and mixed-media artists in the show.

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Khephra Burns

PAINT AND THE FIELD OF PLAY pg 22 A look at the art and influence of Ernie Barnes on a generation of contemporary black artists.

WRITERS

Khephra Burns Liv Wright Shani Jamila Dr. James B. Peterson Jenna Bond Louden ART AND PRODUCTION

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GIFTED HANDS pg 28 The f-ormer NFL fullback brings the passion of the game to his art and life.

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CREATIVE DIRECTOR

LaVon Leak

NEW YORK ARTS EDUCATION pg 32 The nature and nurture of future fine artists in a prominent Harlem school.

onyxart@mac.com ART DIRECTION/PRODUCTION

Sandra Lawrence PHOTO EDITOR

Adreinne Waheed WEBSITE www.hfas.org

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HOTSPOTS pg 38 From dives to fine dining: the venues, menus and magic uptown.

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BROWN PRINTING COMPANY Publishers since 1949 New York, New York © 2014 by JWD Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo copying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Queries should be addressed to JWD Enterprises, Inc, P.O. Box 232, Purchase New York, NY 10577.

Tird Edition Printed in the United States of America

COVER - Sculptor and painter Phillip Crosby.

Spondy, oil, 42”x36”, by Phillip Crosby. “Spondy” is an abbreviation of spondylolisthesis, a debilitating condition more commonly known as a slipped disc.

Spondy is Crosby’s depiction of the condition that ended his career in professional football but also set him on a path to becoming a serious artist.

Proud sponsors of the Harlem Fine Arts Show New York City Celebrating SUPER BOWL XLVIII

PUBLISHER’S PAGE

HAPPY FIFTH ANNIVERSARY HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW! With each successive year, HFAS has grown in attendance, drawing artists, galleries, collectors and the curious from Harlem and communities across the country. This year HFAS will take the show on tour.

l While the Harlem Fine Arts Show is yet in its infancy, we are nonetheless proud of these frst few steps taken over the last fve years. We’ve crawled, lurched, tottered, stumbled, even danced occasionally on this journey to a place of recognition the world over as the premier multicultural arts organization and showcase for fne art. We’re still on the frst leg of this journey, but we’ve got strong legs, and we’re just hitting our stride.

Te year was 2009 when our frst Harlem Fine Arts Show opened at the 143rd Street Armory in Harlem. We saw slightly fewer than 3000 art lovers come through the doors for this inaugural event. Tey came with curiosity, enthusiasm and a hunger for beauty and refections of themselves. We all harbored incredible hopes and dreams for the future of our infant show as it stepped out into the world. Fast forward to 2012, when more than 10,000 returning and frst-time visitors flled our home for the last four years, the historic Riverside Church. Artist representation at our shows has grown from 60 in 2010 to 90 artists and galleries that have been juried and now fall under the Harlem Fine Arts umbrella. Tis year, HFAS kicks of its annual exhibition during Super Bowl week, and with our Super Bowl partners, we’ve endeavored to bring you a number of kindred surprises.

Te future is bright! In 2014 the HFAS announces a four-city tour that includes New York, Atlanta, Martha’s

Top left: Riverside Church, home of the Harlem Fine Arts Show since 2010; Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, Martha’s Vineyard; Atlantic Station, Atlanta; Merchandise Mart, Chicago.

Vineyard and Chicago and steps the event up another rung to national stature. After ringing the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange at the opening of the 2013 show, we are now ringing the bell for Americans of all persuasions to come and partake of what can only be described as a feast for the eyes and nourishment for the soul, a national treasure and exhibition. Our mission remains the same, creating a platform for fine art of the African Diaspora in an exciting and informative environment.

Te best is yet to come,

Dion Clarke Dion Clarke, Founder of the Harlem Fine Arts Show HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 07

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THE 2014 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW Growing demand for the Harlem Fine Arts Show is pushing producers to take the show on the road. Next stops: Atlanta, Chicago and the Vineyard.

BY KHEPHRA BURNS

● “I love this show,” Tracey said, speaking

of last year’s Harlem Fine Arts Show (HFAS), staged for the third year in a row at Harlem’s historic Riverside Church. “Harlem’s got it goin’ on,” she continued. “It’s like a second Harlem Renaissance. Te show has gotten better each year, and now you’ve got all these great restaurants and clubs.” One sensed that Tracey, a Harlem native who moved further downtown some years ago, wished she was back in the mix—an uptown resident again.

“Did you see Frank Frazier?” she asked excitedly. “Te new stuf he’s doing with shoe polish?!” Mr. Frazier, himself a native of Harlem who now makes his home in Dallas and the world, has shown at the Harlem Fine Arts Show since its inception fve years ago. A mid-career artist widely recognized for his signature African fgures collaged from paint, African fabrics and other mixed media, he now works with black shoe polish—the traditional medium of black men long-relegated by racism to the role of shoe-shine boy—to produce potent political images of of the Civil Rights Movement.

PHOTOS: GERALD PEART

A Growing Interest in Art Frank Frazier is one of an increasing number of mid-career and emerging artists of growing renown, whose works and physical presence can be found at the Harlem Fine Arts Show. Te show itself has grown exponentially in attendance each year, from 4,000 in 2006 to 10,000 in 2013. And this, the ffh annual HFAS exposition will no doubt further expand both its reputation and numerical participation. Tat growth is in fact part and parcel of the growth nationally in arts fairs and expositions, from Detroit to Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Chicago, Evanston, Boston, Houston, Phoenix, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Denver, Des Moines, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.; and internationally at destinations like Berlin, Florence, Brussels, Basel, Switzerland; and Havana, Cuba. And almost everywhere you will fnd work indicative of the widespread and burgeoning interest in African American artists, in particular, and contemporary artists of the African Diaspora in general.

Black Like Me by Glenn Ligon, a much-celebrated emerging artists, and Sky Light and Watusi by Alma Tomas (1891–1978), who is considered one of the black masters, now hang on the walls of the White House.

Tat interest can be measured as well in the growing popularity of auctions at Swann Galleries in New York, which has created a department of African American art and in 2007 sold an oil by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas for $600,000. Some of the

Top: Artist Sidney Carter. Middle: The Harlem Fine Arts Show. Above: Guests Keisha James Sutton, former VP, Inner City Broadcasting; Kalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center; NYC Council member Inez Dickens; and Essie Green Gallery owner Sherman Edmiston.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 9

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HFAS GALA

Nearly 10,000 people passed through the show last year.

PHOTOs: GERALD PEART

bidders at Christie’s in London and New York, respectively, shelled out a record-breaking $20.2 million and $26.4 million for two works by Jean Michel Basquiat.

Prices for the masters–Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, Robert S. Duncanson, Edward Mitchell Bannister, Horace Pippin, Alma Tomas, Elizabeth Catlett, William H. Johnson. H.O. Tanner and more–continue to climb through the roof. When this writer frst met Romare Bearden in 1979, original Beardens could be had for a few hundreds to a few thousands of dollars, just slightly more than the cost of visits we now make to the doctor afer banging our heads against the wall for failing to purchase works before they exceeded the reach of all but the very wealthy. Today, original Beardens sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even mid-career artists can be pricey. Kara Walker, 44, commands prices over $400,000 for her signature silhouettes of black stereotypes.

Who Goes, Who Shows Founded in 2006, the Harlem Fine Arts Show provides a venue annually for the serious collector with a focus on works by these and other artists of African descent, as well as a point of entry for the novice collector and the merely curious just looking to see themselves, their culture and history rendered creatively on canvas, in stone or steel or any medium improvised from the lefovers, residue and discarded remnants of America’s consumer culture. For many in Harlem and the surrounding communities, HFAS may represent their frst exposure to fne art refecting the breadth and depth of the African Diaspora. Works exhibited at the show in Harlem and its sister show in Martha’s Vineyard range in price from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Novice collectors can acquire still afordable works by emerging artists, some of whom may become tomorrow’s black masters.

Te 2014 Harlem Fine Arts Show will run from January 29 to February 2 at the Riverside Church in Harlem and will feature, in addition to works by many of the artists already named, paintings by such celebrated emerging and mid-career artists as Verna Hart, Eric Girault, Burnett Curtis Grayson III and Alonzo Adams.

Hart, a young expressionist painter, is also an improviser in the best tradition of jazz, which “paints” the rhythms of American life in rich and varied tonal colors.

Hart literally paints in the tones she hears in jazz, and the music in one form or other is most often her subject. She was born to the music in Harlem, where she still lives and works, and her artistic affinity with it has been recognized by some of its acknowledged masters, including the legendary drummer Max Roach, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie and Stephane Grappelli, all of whom have not only collected her work, but used it on album covers and in performances.

Impressionist painter Eric Girault has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally since the 1970’s with works whose themes embrace both American life and the people and passions of his native Haiti. Grayson’s early influences include Ernie Barnes, whose work he first saw on the 70’s TV sitcom Good Times; his own work was used in the HBO production of Terri McMillan’s Disappearing Acts and, more recently, in the feature film The Best Man Holiday.

Adams, another Harlem native, was featured in the Black Romance exhibit at the Studio Museum of Harlem.

Works by these and other artists will be on display for the preview event at Riverside Church, where some will be auctioned to beneft the Smile Design Gallery, an initiative of Dr. Lee Gause, founder of Smile Design Manhattan. Dr. Gause uses proceeds from the sale of fne art at the Smile Design Gallery to fund free dental services for hundreds of children who otherwise could not aford them. Artist and writer Shani Jamila interviewed Dr. Gause about the Smile Design Gallery and reports on it in this issue of the Harlem Fine Arts Show Magazine.

Synergy between the NFL and the arts may not be readily apparent to many, but like the late Ernie Barnes, who had simultaneous careers in both the arts and professional sports, a number of current and former NFL players today are pursuing a passion for the arts and have created an association known as Smocks and Jocks. One of its members, sculptor and former Bufalo Bills fullback Phillip Crosby, is the subject of a profle in this issue by Lehigh University professor and frequent MSNBC contributor Dr. James Braxton Peterson.

In addition to great art, hors d’oeuvres, an open bar and the see-and-be-seen scene, opening night will host live music from the talented students of the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA), a deserving benefciary of the 2014 show. Yvette L. Campbell, HSA’s president and CEO, is not just a proud administrator and passionate advocate for the school, but, as a former Alvin Ailey dancer, is herself a product of the arts and their power to change lives. “We’re building the artists of tomorrow,” she says. “Harlem is the place to be. Tere is nothing else quite like this. We’re a community arts facility,” she says speaking of the school, “and we love our kids.”

On Friday HFAS will host the traditional Youth Empowerment Day, with invitations extended to all area schools—public, private and charter—to see the show and take part in a Fortune 500 careers expo. Te exhibition will continue through Saturday and Sunday with works by more than 100 artists and lectures by guest speakers.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 11

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PHOTOs:RICK MATTEIs/ HFAs

HFAS GALA Going on the Road Te success, popularity and growth of the Harlem Fine Arts Show—and the demand on the part of many who’ve heard about it but were too far distant to take part in previous years—prompted the producers to mount a summer satellite show on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts two years ago. Among the more than thirty artists who exhibited that frst year were painter Paul Goodnight and sculptor Woodrow Nash, and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates served as the opening night’s master of ceremonies. Tat initial success necessitated the move to a larger venue last year and again this summer, when the HFAS Martha’s Vineyard show will host a fve-day arts exhibit and related activities at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School in Oak Blufs, Massachusetts.

Given the demand, Atlanta and Chicago seemed the next logical stops on what has been shaping up to be a Harlem Fine Arts Show tour, and so HFAS will travel to Atlanta this June to curate an exhibition of black artists centered in the southeast region of the country. Atlanta is a hub city for the region and especially for the arts. In the Metro Atlanta area alone the presence of such talented artists as Radclife Bailey, Diane Edison (in nearby Athens), Bethany Collins, Kojo Grifn, Benjamin Jones and Yanique Norman suggests the breadth and depth and caliber of the work that HFAS could access for its exhibitions. And Clark Atlanta University, with its African American Art Collection, and the Hammonds House Museum, would seem natural HFAS partner institutions. Te show is slated to go up at Atlantic Station in the heart of Atlanta. Te National Black Arts Festival, held annually in Atlanta, has been designated as a benefciary of part of the proceeds from the show.

Looking further out to the fall, HFAS will mount a show in Chicago at the Merchandise Mart, which will shine a light on African Americans in fnance and their role in promoting and sustaining the arts. Chicago has a long and rich history as a center for African American creative artists. While the Harlem Renaissance is widely celebrated for the fowering of art and literature that gave birth to a new black consciousness in the 1920’s, a similar, if less well publicized, black renaissance was taking place in Chicago with such seminal fgures as Archibald Motley, William Edouard Scott, Charles White and Eldzier Cortor. Among their artistic progeny in Chicago are Dawoud Bey, Barbara Jones Hogu, Kerry James Marshall, Wadsworth Jarrell, William Walker and the late Allen Stringfellow. Tese and other artists are represented by a number of established and reputable galleries and institutions, including G.R. N’Namdi Gallery, Nicole Gallery, eta Creative Arts Foundation, the DuSable and the African American Arts Alliance of Chicago.

More than an historic incubator of a vibrant creative culture, Harlem is emblematic of black creativity that exists wherever concentrations of black people are gathered in communities empowered not only to respond to oppression, but also express the joy and beauty of being black. Tese are always the centers of musical creativity, and of dance, but also, and increasingly, of a unique visual aesthetic that is manifest in the works of painters, sculptors and conceptual artists whose vision and references are at once culturally specifc and universal. Te Harlem Fine Arts Show is becoming a major player in promoting an awareness of this aesthetic and the artists that give it life.

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12 1. Art and smiles were on the menu at the HFAS Breakfast with Touré in Martha’s Vineyard. 2. Cultural critic and MSNBC contributor Touré and guests. 3. Scenic inspiration for the seascape artists on the Vineyard. 4. The problem of the color lines. 5. Artist Delano Brown and model. 6. Author and editor Harriette Cole, Breakfast moderator. 7. Ayana West of Octagon Sports Marketing with BMW display car. 8. Scenic inspiration for the landscape artists. 9. Food for the body. 10. HFAS intern Cliff Ibarrondo. 11. BMW Communications Manager Tom Penich and HFAS founder Dion Clarke. 12. Food for the soul.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 13

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THE HEALING ARTS OF DR. GAUSE Working primarily in bone and enamel, brothers Lee and Alexandre Gause sculpt smiles across hundreds of young faces through the sale of fine art.

BY SHANI JAMILLA

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

● From Johns Hopkins to Columbia University

Medical Center to medical schools throughout the country, clinicians are looking to art to broaden their experiences and deepen their insight into the practice of medicine. Increasingly, it seems, some are taking the trope, art heals, as more than just a metaphor. One doctor in particular is using art to address the problem of thousands of patients who are routinely turned away from treatment because they lack the means to pay for the care they need. Even some who are insured are nevertheless denied care because their coverage doesn’t allow it. Tis unfortunate but all-too-common scenario runs counter to the training, inclinations and deepest desires of medical professionals to heal and alleviate human sufering.

“We want to tell people yes, we can help you,” Dr. Lee Gause declares from the midtown ofce of his private dental practice, which he runs with his brother, Dr. Alexandre Gause. Te founder of Smile Design Manhattan (SDM), Dr. Lee Gause has devised an innovative solution to providing free dental care for patients who ordinarily could not aford his services. “We bring amazing people into a room and sell them something they love—art—and we use the proceeds to provide free dentistry,” he says.

It’s a vision that grew out of complimentary treatment the SDM dentists ofered to youths from a school that one of their patients was afliated with. As the demand for their charitable services grew, the associated costs quickly added up, and Dr. Gause knew he would have to fnd a more sustainable solution. Tat solution was the Smile Design Gallery.

“You can do incredible good while still adhering to a solid business model,” he says. “We don’t have to ask people to give us money. We sell incredible art that people can’t buy fast enough.” Works by emerging and mid-career artists like photographer Chi Modu, painter Takashi Murakami and sculptor Angelo Romano are just a few of those represented in the itinerant Smile Design Gallery’s shows.

Te frst of these was held in the dentists’ ofce, with the proceeds going to homeless people from the Bowery Mission.

Dr. Lee Gause, founder and curator of Smile Design Gallery

Te next show benefted school children in Haiti. Within the past year, the Smile Design Gallery has held ten pop-up shows at galleries around the city and performed over $300,000 in dental services. Ninety percent of the clients they serve are children.

One of the most enduring aspects of great art is its power to efect change in society. Tanks to these artists, Dr. Gause and the Smile Design Gallery, approximately fve hundred uninsured and underinsured people have received dental care ranging from simple cleanings to full-mouth restorations. Tese patients have access to the same staf, materials, lab and level of care that SDM’s paying patients receive. “All people, regardless of socio-economic status, deserve access to the highest quality care,” says Dr. Gause. “And the doctor should educate you about what he’s doing and why,” he adds. “It should be a clean, polite and comfortable experience.”

While they are yet young in their practice, the Gause brothers know what good health care should feel like. Tey hail from a prominent family of dentists in North Carolina.

Teir mother, Dr. Suzette Stines, was ranked in the top three percent of dental practitioners in the world by the International College of Dentists. Perhaps prophetically, she told the Wilmington Star News some thirty years ago, “Tere’s a real art to dentistry....We’re trying to orient this practice so that it will be accessible to people.”

Te apple doesn’t fall far.... “My initial goal with dentistry was to be able to practice the last few years for free,” says Dr. Gause.

“With the Smile Design Gallery, I can give a little away all the time. I couldn’t be more happy. My practice feeds my dreams.”

To learn more about the work of Smile Design Manhattan and the Smile Design Gallery, go to www.smiledesigngallery.com.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 15

THE FIERCE PASSIONS OF

Tina Knowles (left) and home hung with works by Buchi Upjohn, Dion Cupido, Xolile Mtakatya and Robert Pruitt.

TINA KNOWLES d

A room of her own. Tina Knowles found an early home in galleries and museums, which Someone once said that with the loss of art in our lives, we’re forced to rely on psychotherapy to keep us sane and make sense of our passions. Art helps to harmonize an ofen chaotic and discordant world and alleviate some of the stress that comes with it.

Tina Knowles, like many avid collectors, gets it.

“I’ve always loved art and knew how important it was to completing a room,” she says of art’s power to compose our environment. “I got passionate about it when a friend convinced me that I didn’t have to be rich to start collecting. You can buy art that you love at very afordable prices from young, emerging black artists—who need our support and who may be tomorrow’s masters. It’s about your eye. Te more you look, the more you will see.”

Knowles’s eye and appreciation developed as an extension of her own creations—what might be called wearable art—comPAGE 16 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

ing out of her House of Deréon fashion line to accent the exterior decor of our lives. Who doesn’t know that she designed for the always exquisitely attired Destiny’s Child? Her daughters, entertainers Beyoncé and Solange, tease her about her lifelong passions. “Tey used to joke that other kids have memories of cookies baking,” Tina says, “while they have memories of museums and the fabric store.”

Museums and galleries are still her favorite haunts: the Houston Museum of African American Culture, New York’s Metropolitan, the High in Atlanta, the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Galleries like Telma Harris’s in Oakland and Black Heritage Gallery in Houston; dealers like Eugene Foney and Marcus Smith in Houston, and Dr. Lee Gause in New York are among her favorites. Dr. Alvia Wardlaw, a retired curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the University Museum at Texas

THE ART OF COLLECTING

PHOTOs COURTEsY OF TINA KNOWLEs

fred a passion to collect works of African American artists. BY SHANI JAMILLA Southern University, is a close friend and advisor.

Relying on a combination of expert recommendations and her own instincts, Knowles has amassed quite an impressive collection, flling at least two homes—in New York City and Houston—with the works of masters, mid-career and emerging artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Radclife Bailey, Tornton Dial, Mickalene Tomas, Frank Frazier, William Tolliver, Robert Pruitt and Toyin Odutola.

Regardless the size of one’s art budget, art lovers typically run out of wall space before they run out of money or desire.

Knowles says she recently got “a little apartment” in the French Quarter of her native New Orleans. Not only does it provide her with more wall space for art, but also places her in close proximity to all the fne art galleries on Royal Street. “I’ve not

been to Stella Jones Gallery,” she adds, “but I will.”

It was in New Orleans, in fact, at the Essence Music Festival, that she frst discovered “one of my best fnds ever, ceramic sculptor Woodrow Nash. Nash has been featured before in the Harlem Fine Arts Show Magazine. “I’ve attended the Essence Festival every year and collected great pieces there. I’ve also gone to Art Basel in Miami, and this year I attended Art Basel in Switzerland with my daughter Solange.”

Knowles says that she’s particularly drawn to fgurative art, “art that tells a story and evokes emotions...that speaks to our history and black culture. It reminds me of what it took to get here,” she says. “I just love seeing depictions of black people through time, and I’d like to have something from all eras and all the great African American artists. Even when you can’t aford to buy [we all have our limits], there is so much pleasure HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 17

THE ART OF COLLECTIING

to be had in just seeing great art.”

Eventually, Tina Knowles would like to open her own gallery and bookstore, flled with afordable art and with space for performing artists, flm screenings, poetry readings and studios provided to visual artists in exchange for free art classes PAGE 18 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

ofered to kids in the neighborhood.

“I take a lot of pride in African American art,” she says, “and just think we should support black artists in any way we can.

We are everything we are because of the people who came before us and fought to have us where we are now.”

PHOTOs COURTEsY OF TINA KNOWLEs

Above: Room with a view, or views, of works by Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers, Thornton dial, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff and others. Right: Tina with daughters Beyoncé and Solange and grandson Jules in Paris. Far right: A Hale Woodruff abstract.

HFAS ARTIST LISTING l The following galleries and artists represent the 2014 Harlem Fine

Arts Show Tour in New York, Martha’s Vineyard, Atlanta and Chicago Aaron Fowler Aleathia Brown Alonzo Adams Alyce Faye Andre Collins-NFL Players Association Andrew Nichols Arcmanoro Niles B. Curtis Grayson Basil Watson Bernard Hoyes Brenda Branch Bryan Collier Carol Foy Charly Palmer Christine Osborne Corinthia Peoples Cousen Rose Gallery Dane Tilghman Danny Simmons David Lawrence Dean Williams Design Management Art, LLC Dudley Vaccianna E & S Gallery Ed Lester Elizabeth Baez Ernani Silva Eric Edwards

Eric Girault Essud Fungcap Fedrecia Hartley Frank Frazier Frank Morrison George Nock Greg Adkins Gregory Charles Harry Seymour Haitian Peace Quilts - Jeanne Staples Jamal Stafford Janice Thacker Joachim McMillian John Dowell Jonathon Romain Laura James LaVon Leak Leroy Campbell LeShun Beal Luis Martin Lynne Toye Lyvan Munlyn Margerine R. Gordon Mark Sublett Mary Chang Michael Bradley Michael Markman Minna Dunn Nashemia Billups

Nicole Gallery Nkosi Distincitve Imported Craft Otis Williams Philip Smallwood Robert Carter Rory T. Morgan Rose Luangisa Salaam Muhammad Scherezade Garcia Sidney Carter Sir Shadow Smile Design Gallery Sterling Brown Sterling Shaw Steven Dailey Synthia St. James Swizz Beatz Sylvia Maier TAFA Tay The Ace Project - Loris Crawford True African Art Verna Hart WaterKolours Ron Witherspoon Woodrow Nash Wycliffe Bennett Yves Deshommes

For additional information about these artists, please go to www.hfas.org

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 21

Above: A portrait of the artist, Ernie Barnes. Opposite: One of Barnes’s iconic works, The Bench, painted in his hotel room less than an hour after returning from a game.

PAGE 22 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

ERNIE

PAINT AND THE FIELD OF PLAY:

© cOPyrIGHT PerMISSION, erNIe BArNeS FAMILy TruST

THE RHYTHM OF BLACK LIFE’S STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS CAPTURED ON CANVAS

Like many, I was frst made aware of Ernie Barnes as the artist whose now iconic painting Sugar Shack graced the cover of Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You and accompanied the closing credits for the 70’s TV sitcom Good Times.

It was a seductive tease to Marvin’s urgent sensual eroticism beckoning wantonly beneath the cover—each of Barnes’s ecstatic, jubilant fgures signifying with motion and emotion an unspoken but emphatic, “I want you.” Teir eyes are closed; wholly rapt in themselves and the moment, heedless of the judgments of any looking in on them. Te artwork was new, but the scene it celebrated was timeless. It conveyed a moment

of communion that most African Americans know intimately from experience. It was at once of the moment, deeply nostalgic and timeless. Sugar Shack had captured the spirit of the times, they were good times, and we danced freely, with unselfconscious abandon, and black love.

While serious consideration of Barnes’s work seems conspicuously absent from discussions of fne art, a few critics have cited comparisons to such European past masters as El Greco and a host of Italian Mannerists for the elaborate, stylized poses of his elongated and sinuous human fgures, and to Dutch and Flemish genre painters like Pieter Brueghel, whose

BARNES

THE ART OF

BY KHEPHRA BURNS

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 23

paintings similarly celebrated the life and manners of ordinary people in a writhing mass of dancing bodies.

One critic in particular, Frank Getlein, waxes eloquent in his description of the scene depicted in Sugar Shack: “Curve answers curve, from the saxophone to the belly of the sax player, from the hand motions of the guitar player to the empty hands of the ‘air guitarist’ below him. Te people are all angles and curves, a forest of curvilinear diagonals against the somber planes of the setting, of strong lighting in details against the relative darkness of the overall scene, all adding up to a highly sophisticated composition.”

Te use of such spatial relationships with elongated human fgures bending like notes in a blues has led Getlein to credit

Barnes as the founder of a neo-Mannerist movement. While young Ernest, growing up in Durham, North Carolina, in the late 30’s and early 40’s, was fortunate to have been exposed to paintings by such artists as Lautrec, Delacroix, Michelangelo and others in the art books he found at the home of a lawyer for whom his mother worked as a domestic, the infuence of these artists on his style would be difcult to determine. Sugar Shack emerged from Barnes’s recollections of his childhood in Durham, and it doesn’t stretch the imagination much to see in the mannerisms, attitudes, stance and style of small-town Southern black folk the source of all that rhythm animating his canvases.

Barnes’s seeming synthesis of Mannerist and genre styles

“I traded in my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes and put all the violence and power I had felt on the feld into my paintings.” is less likely the result of conscious emulation than an unconscious assimilation and personal interpretation of the attitudes and mannerisms of a culture. Tey’re the same that informed Archibald Motley’s Syncopation (1925), Stomp (1927), Saturday Night (1935), Chicken Shack (1936) and Nightlife (1943). Te same that animated Miguel Covarrubias’s illustrations for Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. Tey’re the folk of Eatonville, Florida, as much as those from the Bottoms of Durham, whenever a jook joint is jumping, the music is throbbing and couples are swinging, finging, freaking or slow-dragging their way back to themselves.

Motley’s was a joyous celebration of the vitality of urban African American life, as Barnes’s work celebrated the Durham of his childhood. But the will of the spirit is the same—to rise up. Overweight and shy as a child, Barnes was bullied. He took refuge in art, ofen sitting alone with his sketchbook. Support and encouragement were hard to come by. He tells the story that while visiting the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, he asked where he could fnd paintings by Negro artists and was told by the docent that his people “don’t PAGE 24 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

express themselves that way.” (Robert S. Duncanson had been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1842, Edward Mitchell Bannister since 1876, and H.O. Tanner, Bearden, Douglas, Lewis, Lawrence were all known by 1956, though apparently not to this docent.) Barnes’s belated response was to return to the museum with a solo exhibition in 1978.

And art was not the only line along which a bullied, fat black kid would have poetic justice. Encouraged by a junior high school teacher to begin working out, he did and graduated high school with 26 athletic scholarship ofers. He attended North Carolina College of Durham (now North Carolina Central University) and was subsequently drafed by the Washington Redskins, but was rejected only minutes later when they discovered they had unwittingly drafed a black player. No room for black skin among red necks in 1959. But he was then drafed by the world-champion Baltimore Colts.

Te feld of play became his canvas and the all-consuming subject of his work. “I hate to think, had I not played sports, what my work would look like,” he once confessed. In the clash and swirling mass of muscled bodies, Barnes made mental note

ERNIE BARNES

© COPYRIGHT PERMIssION, ERNIE BARNEs FAMILY TRUsT

Opposite: Ernie Barnes in his Los Angeles studio, 1996. Above: The Runner embodies the lone dedication required to go the distance.

of every grunt and grimace and straining sinew: “Te shape of the linemen…the body language a defensive lineman would occupy...his posture...the reaction of the defense to your movement...the awareness of the lines within the movement, the pattern within the lines, the rhythm of the movement.”

Limbs failing, hands clawing, lunging, pushing and pain are all captured in Barnes’s early paintings. Returning to his hotel room afer a game, he would ofen go straight to the canvas, hoping to capture a moment before it evaporated. It was on one such occasion, painting urgently with only a palette knife, that Barnes created Te Bench. It was fnished in under an hour, and is the only painting he would not part with, despite the many ofers.

Afer Baltimore Barnes would play with the New York Titans (briefy), the San Diego Chargers, Denver Broncos and, in the Canadian Football League, the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

It probably was indicative of his shifing focus and where his primary interest lay that he was ofen fned by Denver coach Jack Faulkner for sketching during team meetings.

“One day on the playing feld, I looked up and the sun was breaking through the clouds, hitting the unmuddied areas on the

uniforms, and I said, ‘Tat’s beautiful!’ I knew then that it was all over being a player. I was more interested in art. So I traded in my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes and put all the violence and power I had felt on the feld into my paintings.”

Tough years removed from the isolation of his shy, fat childhood in Durham, one has to wonder if Barnes was ever really at home in the game. Team sports are a sublimation of war, and none more so than football, where armored combatants battle for glory and a few yards of turf, casualties are carried of the feld and some, like Barnes’s Titans teammate Howard Glenn, die as a result. Mens sana in corpore sano, the classical ideal of the scholar athlete, highly developed in body and mind, is an anomaly today, a “weirdo,” as the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin, a classics scholar and Stanford University graduate, was branded by his teammates. Barnes’s autobiography, From Pads to Palette (1995), began as a series of articles in the Gridiron titled “I Hate the Game I Love.”

Sports and their metaphors for life would continue to be major themes in Barnes’s work, especially as depicted in idealized, non-professional settings like playgrounds and make-shif courts, where black youths soar with style and grace and the HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 25

Top: Double Dutch. Above: Barnes with actor Jimmie Walker, who played “JJ” on the 70’s sitcom Good Times, with Barnes’s High Aspirations.

PAGE 26 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

promise of life beyond sport. Tis is nowhere better depicted than in Barnes’s High Aspirations. Suspended in fight midway between his desolate, barren circumstances and an impossibly high hoop fashioned from a produce basket the bottom has fallen out of, a solitary black youth with high hopes reaches up, his arm, in Getlein’s poetic turn of phrase, “stretched beyond the limits of anatomical possibility,” to slam-dunk the ball. Tat hoop is the only thing that has sprouted in his world. We see him at the moment of his ascendancy, grasping the ball like an oversized ripe orange, the harvest of all his hard work, intention and talent. Tat ball could be the sun itself. And Barnes seems to suggest that what at frst seems impossible may be merely a stretch.

Upon his retirement from football Barnes was retained by the New York Jets as a salaried player but in the unprecedented position of ofcial team artist. Over the years, he was also commissioned to do works for the Lakers, the New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders, Boston Patriots and the NBA, and was named Ofcial Sports Artist for the Games of the XXII Olympiad in 1984.

But it was Sugar Shack and the album covers he did for Donald Byrd, Curtis Mayfeld, the Crusaders and others, together with the paintings “ghosted” for the character J.J. on the TV sitcom Good Times, that frst introduced millions of African Americans to “black art” and made his work perhaps the most widely recognizable of any artist.

As Telma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, said in a previous issue of the Harlem Fine Arts Show Magazine, “Tose images by Ernie Barnes became very well known. And for me, as someone deeply invested in how the work of black artists travels in the world, gets seen, gets understood and becomes normative as an idea, that little pop-culture moment really looms for me as profound.”

© cOPyrIGHT PerMISSION, erNIe BArNeS FAMILy TruST

ERNIE BARNES

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW Comes to Atlanta this Summer in Partnership with the

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JuNe

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ART SHOW and SALE

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This June, the Harlem Fine Arts Show launches the National Black Arts Festival— a three-month, city-wide celebration of the arts and artists of the African Diaspora.

VISuAL ARTS MuSIc THEATER FILM DANcE YOuTH EMpOWERMENT YOuR SuMMER DESTINATION THROugH SEpTEMbER, 2014 “When the National Black Arts Festival is at its highest level, it extols the spirit of the African American. And in that extolling, one sees the spirit of all human beings.”

– Dr. Maya Angelou, Author, Poet, Global Renaissance Woman

For more information and to join our mailing list visit www.NBAF.org

The tension of twisted metal turns the visceral pain of loss into movement in Crosby’s Shredded Ball of Idle Hands, aluminum and acrylic paint, 17”x28”x14”.

Right: Tree of Wisdom, acrylic on sheet metal, 36”x42”. The body of common knowledge as a tree with multiple branches reaching in every direction to access the light.

PAGE 28 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

STRIPPED HANDS, GIFTED HANDS:

PHILLIP CROSBY

FASHIONS A SECOND LIFE FORMER NFL FULLBACK PHILLIP CROSBY FINDS NEW METAPHORS IN METAL.

BY DR. JAMES B. PETERSON

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PHILLIP CROSBY

Football and the fne arts are terms rarely, if ever, used in the same sentence. But if Andre Collins, director of Former Players Services for the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), has his way, Smocks and Jocks will emerge as both a recreational and professional destination for the NFL’s most talented citizens. Collins founded Smocks and Jocks, an initiative he spearheads within the NFLPA, “to let people see who we are.” In existence for nearly a decade, Smocks and Jocks puts a spotlight on the postseason careers of artistically gifed players moving from pads and pigskin to easels and pigments. And while a fne-art aesthetic produced by current and former world-class athletes may never attract the kind of attention their kinesthetic abilities have, Collins believes their creativity on the feld is indica-

tive of—even inextricably linked to—an innate creativity that, for some, fnds expression in the arts. “So many decent young men play this game, and Smocks and Jocks gives these players an opportunity to show a diferent side of themselves.”

Phillip Crosby, whose six-year career was just slightly longer than the average for an NFL player, is one of those. Having spent four years as a fullback for the Bufalo Bills and a year each in New England and San Diego, he recalls his stint in the NFL as a rollercoaster ride—plagued by the physical highs and lows of a sport that demands everything a human body can give and more. “My body feels it now,” he tells me in an interview that nearly runs up against a birthday party for his daughter.

Afer an abrupt end to his career, Crosby says he obsessed frequently, Why am I not playing anymore? Why am I an outcast? “I felt like the game had been ripped away from me.”

It was at that point that he “fell back into [his] art.” He didn’t have far to fall. Crosby had minored in art at the University of Tennessee—an interest that some might fnd anomalous for an athlete, but one that’s precisely counter to the stereotype Smocks and Jocks is working to dispel. Crosby’s afnity for HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 29

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PHILLIP CROSBY

Voices, acrylic on sheet metal, 36”x42”, is Crosby’s interpretation of the idea of personalities and the subtle messages, positive and negative, we take from them.

PHOTOs COURTEsY OF PHILLIP CROsBY

In Freestyle (oil on wood and steel, 28”x48”x15”), Crosby uses the interplay of materials to express hard times and cool personalities.

the visual arts came early in fact. His father was an exceptionally gifed artist who never got an opportunity to showcase his work in a setting commensurate with his talent. But the elder Crosby’s dedication to his craf was an inspiration and seminal infuence on his son’s own artistic aspirations. At UT, Phillip’s academic-athletic schedule was so demanding that it usually lef him only summers to pursue his interest in the arts.

With his professional career in the NFL over, and still feeling that the game he loved had been “ripped away” from him, Crosby returned to art, initially working with acrylics on canvas. But a two-dimensional medium, he fnally conceded, was insufcient to capture the depth of all that he was feeling.

“I started working with metals in order to work through my anger,” he admits. He took a deliberately aggressive approach to sculpting and ultimately found his groove. Shredded Ball of Idle

Hands, one of his sculptures showcased during last year’s Super Bowl festivities, captures metaphorically the emptiness he felt in being lef behind afer giving his all on the gridiron. But empowered by a creative imagination, those same hands, lef empty and seemingly useless, now carry his art and life forward with the passion and edge he brought to the game.

“Each piece has purpose and meaning...and movement, and expresses some aspect of myself,” Crosby says with the equanimity of a man who has found his voice in the medium for which his hands were destined. Given what we now know about the challenges faced by so many former NFL players, the search for a creative, post-NFL medium of expression on the part of former athletes is one that the league and the NFLPA would do well to support through initiatives like Smock and Jocks.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 31

HARLEM SCHOOL

Philanthropic support for institutions like the Harlem School of the Arts is opening up a

● What makes artists diferent from other people

is how they see and feel the world around them and what they do with what they see and feel. Te best are able to give us a new perspective, show us how we can look at the world a little diferently, and for that we are ofen willing to pay handsomely.

Te last two years in the art world have seen record-breaking seasons with the sale of famous paintings topping the $100 million mark at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses. A big sale at Sotheby’s can be the pinnacle of an artist’s career. Or, if you’re an art student at the Harlem School of the Arts (HSA), it can challenge stereotypes of what artists look like and where they are from.

We are fortunate here in New York City to have institutions like the HSA to nurture and support the artist that lies within the souls of our youth. And equally fortunate to have instituPAGE 32 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

tions and individuals who recognize the value of the arts and support them. Such was the philanthropic calling of Ruth Clark, founder and president of the Support Network. Most know Clark as the frst African American woman to own and successfully operate a stafng temporary service, but she is also an energetic fundraiser for causes that make it possible for children who are in need to thrive.

She established Clark Unlimited Personnel, Inc. (CUP), in the early 1970’s when white-collar ofce jobs in New York City were opening up for black jobseekers. Her company grew and she prospered, providing temporary staf for some of the largest companies in corporate America. In 1982 she founded the Support Network as a 501(c)(3) nonproft charity to raise money for children in need. She built a reputation for getting her contacts in business,

OF THE ARTS

As a member of the HSA faculty, master African percussionist ”Baba” Don Eaton has trained children like these for more than 25 years.

PHOTO: BYRON MCCRAY

world of possibilities for Harlem youth. BY LIV WRIGHT government, entertainment, sports and society to support such causes as the Harlem Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Early Steps, Prep for Prep and several independent schools.

“My heart broke at the sight of babies born with their organs outside their bodies, so I had to get the people I knew to do something,” said Clark about the Neonatal Unit. “We had to keep those babies alive.”

Te Support Network also kept alive the dreams of low-income parents of color who wanted their 5-year-old and 6-yearold children to start school in the independent system. Tis is the system that places children on the track that will lead them to the Harvards and Yales of the world.

Te Support Network raised scholarship money to enable low-income families to work with the Early Start program and

ultimately get their children into kindergarten or frst grade at a private school, where a college degree and professional career are the natural goals of education.

Similarly, Clark’s charity raised scholarship money for Prep for Prep—the leadership development program for children of color that helps high-achieving 5th and 6th graders in public, charter and parochial schools get into the college preparatory high schools that track to top-tier universities.

Te Prep for Prep program helps New York kids attend the kind of high school, for example, that President Barak Obama attended in Honolulu. In his frst book, Dreams From My Father, he wrote: “[F]or my grandparents, my admission into Punahou Academy heralded the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 33

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Above: The barre is set high for budding ballerinas at HSA. Left: Young musicians discover that discipline is the key to virtuosity. Bottom: Visions and dreams take shape in broad strokes and fine detail.

everyone know.”

Achievement. Pride. Leadership Development.

Ruth Clark’s philanthropic vision, through the Support Network, has been supporting these personal development objectives for youth for more than 30 years.

Today, she is raising money for the youth development nonproft, Te World of Money. Founded in 2005, it helps youth learn how to live a fnancially responsible and philanthropic life by learning, earning, saving, investing and donating. Its skills-building curriculum includes Mandarin Chinese, Excel, volunteering in community service projects and trips to such foreign business locales as mainland China and Hong Kong.

Te World of Money seeks to create a culture of voluntarism and philanthropy among black and brown youth by breaking the generational cycles of fnancial lack that have kept communities of color from full participation in American society.

And it is such voluntarism and philanthropy that make possible the Harlem School of the Arts. Founded by internationally acclaimed soprano Dorothy Maynor, the pioneering cultural institution provides quality arts education in fve disciplines: music, dance, theater, musical theater and visual arts.

When she opened the school in 1964 Maynor’s vision was to ofer students “access to the arts and the freedom to discover and develop the artist and citizen within themselves in an environment that emphasizes rigorous training, stimulates creativity, builds self-confdence and adds a dimension of beauty to their lives, empowering them to become the creative thinkers and innovative leaders of tomorrow.”

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 35

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When she opened the school in 1964 Maynor’s vision was to offer students “access to the arts and the freedom to discover and develop the artist and citizen within themselves”

PHOTO: MESIYAH MCGINNIS

Life is full of drama. Telling stories and acting them out is an art that Harlem knows well. We wear the mask. It’s the therapy that keeps the community sane. At Harlem School of the Arts, the next generation of storytellers is already in the making.

It is a vision whose implementation will mark a half century next year, now that it has survived the threat of having to close that it faced in 2010 because of mortgage and debt. Te Herb Alpert Foundation, founded by record producer cum musician, painter and philanthropist Herb Alpert, gave $6 million to the school to retire its debt obligations and give it a fresh start.

When asked in a New York Times interview earlier this year about what moved him to make the gift, Alpert said that when he visited the school and saw the enthusiasm in the students’ eyes, he felt a “strong pull to them.” In March 2013 the iconic home of the Harlem School of the Arts was renamed The Herb Alpert Center.

Last year, afer its rebirth, the HSA served more than 3,000 young people, ages 2-18, through its afer-school and Saturday classes, in-school arts education workshops and summer arts programs. Its vigorous recovery eforts have been supported by the leadership of New York City and its most important philanthropies and corporate donors, including AT&T, Consolidated Edison Company, Ford Foundation, Jack & Jill of America, Incorporated, TD Charitable Foundation, Wells Fargo Foundation and Xerox Corporation.

Te HSA has a proud heritage. Te HSA Prep program provides advanced artistic training, academic mentoring and admissions assistance to students who seek placements into specialized performing/fne arts high schools, and four-year liberal arts colleges and conservatories. And HSA students have been accepted into New York City’s fnest arts programs—the

Alvin Ailey School, the Professional Performing Arts School and LaGuardia School of the Performing Arts.

Since its inception, HSA has exposed students to world-class professional artists, who teach and inspire them. Trough its artist-in-residence and guest artist programs, the school ofers youth the opportunity to spend quality time with cultural leaders and innovators.

Tis year, Tony award- and Emmy award-winning dancerchoreographer Twyla Tarp will create work, rehearse her dancers, present community open rehearsals and performances, ofer professional dance master classes and workshop intensives, and work with HSA dance students.

When I spoke with HSA president and CEO Yvette Campbell and asked her whether the young dancers at HSA know how famous Tarp is, she said, “Tey don’t know now, but they will.

We want our kids to feel that New York City belongs to them and that success is as natural as breathing. We love it when they see one of their classmates on a Broadway stage and say, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s so-and-so from class.’”

Campbell, a former dancer and applied math major in college, said that youth who study in the arts know that they won’t get to be good without practicing, and practice takes patience. As a young dancer, she experienced the satisfaction of the incremental improvements that practice makes possible, and has seen it in the self-confdence that grows in the bearing of each student.

“Tey learn patience here,” she said.

Maybe that’s what really makes an artist an artist.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 37

HOTSPOTS

The Edible Empire

BY JENNA BOND @thejennabond on Twitter.com

1

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The days and nights of Harlem legend are being written in its clubs and bistros today.

●

Finally, Harlem is that cozy ecosystem where locals find fewer reasons to venture downtown, unless, of course, it’s a business venture. These days, I take pleasure in a neighborhood that delivers on the full measure of its day dreams, nightlife, joi de vivre and savoir-faire. The best days end on a good note, with jazz or a soulful deejay scoring the memories I’ll look back on. And with attractive friends and inviting kitchens tucked into the same neighborhood, Harlem has everything the uptown sojourner and curious tourist need to satisfy soul and palate. If tempting menus and uptown magic are your obsession, here’s an update to our guide for the gourmand, gastronome and justly gluttonous in search of good food, good drinks and great company you’ve yet to meet.

PAGE 38 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE

At THE CECIL, it’s all about the menu. Chef Joseph “JJ” Johnson continues restaurateur Alexander Smalls’s legacy for equipping New Yorkers with great restaurants. Here the “feizoada”—a Brazilian-inspired dish of spicy black beans, oxtails and merguez lamb sausage—will move your palate to prayer, and the cinnamon-scented fried guinea hen with charred okra, Asian red beans and roasted sweet potato is already a legend in remote parts of the outer boroughs. And while the decor is upscale corporate cafeteria, simply garnished with potted palms and a lone large-scale portrait, every offering on the menu says Harlem haute cuisine. You will stay for the food, and even longer to consider the satiating dining experience. For brunch they make a deep-dish Caribbean toast—a tropical take on French toast—made with rum,

1. The Cecil (opposite) celebrates Harlem’s tradition of innovation with a mix of uptown class, down-home hospitality and Afro-Asian-American cuisine. 2. The Cecil’s broiled giant spicy prawns and yam flapjack. 3. The first sign of a new hotspot for hot pots on 118th Street.

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4

1Barawine, 2 The Cecil, 3 Minton’s, 4 Maison Harlem 5 Paris Blues, 6 Red Rooster 7 Ginny’s

3

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SUBJECTS

4. Barawine, at the corner of 120th and Lenox, boasts all things French, from wine and cheese to charcuterie. 5. Wall-to-wall wines beckon to the enophile lured by Barawine’s vintage

vanilla and banana. The Cecil is younger sibling and nextdoor neighbor to the legendary (and newly reopened) MINTON’S––the 1940’s birthplace of bebop and cradle of such jazz luminaries as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk. The mix of music and a menu of lowcountry cooking is the open to the next chapter in Minton’s history. Between Minton’s and The Cecil, the old Harlem magic is back, young and fresh again.

Just down the street is BARAWINE, the new French restaurant featuring wine and cheese, charcuterie, all things French and wall-to-wall patrons every night since its opening this past summer. Crowded in a most comfortable way, with gorgeous wine connoisseurs and eager neophytes draped along a magnificent interior and

5

lounging in foursomes, Barawine is where you go for de beaux moments. Just walking in the door quickens the spirit, and the fare is good for both body and soul.

The go-to viands are the hangar steak with mushrooms, shallots and marble potatoes; the chicken breast stuffed with feta and red pepper; and the vegan Thai curry vegetables. If you’re given to nibbling with strangers, there’s no more intriguing clientele nor delectable tray of charcuterie in the city than you’ll find at Barawine’s signature wrap-around bar. While Harlem is the new home of several French restaurants, this one truly captures that certain je ne sais quoi.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 39

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PARIS BLUES PHOTOS: KEITH HAS VISION ROGERS, MAISON HARLEM PHOTOS: MELISSA KIRSCHENHEITER

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6. Paris Blues has generous spirits, jazz and, occasionally, food for all your indigo moods. 7. A classic dive and old-school Harlem hangout, Paris Blues is dominated by a long bar, where even first-time visitors are made to feel as welcome as regulars. 8. The stage is cramped, but the jazz is always sizzling. 9. The duck leg confit at Maison Harlem, the light, airy new French bistro on St. Nicholas and 127th. 10. The bar and blackboard announcing the bistro’s daily rotating specials. 11. The grilled salmon. 12. Maison Harlem owners Romain and Samuel.

Still, on the right night, PARIS BLUES is one of the best places in Harlem to hear jazz. And on special nights, the owner will bring in a homemade buffet of the world’s best chicken as a treat to his most faithful patrons. It’s a dive, an underground un-restaurant, which is part of its allure.

And when the food arrives, it takes you back to the taste of family reunions and Sunday dinners.

But the uptown capital of couples brunches is MAISON HARLEM. (It’s easier to order for two than to decide on just one delight from the menu.) This is the home of must-have omelets. In fact, trust everything they do with ham and eggs. Enjoy one mimosa too many, and this cozy haunt may coax you to stay through brunch to browse a dinner menu celebrated for its hangar steak and truffle mac and cheese.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 41

HOTSPOTS 14

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Among the regulars, of course, there is no better cure for the midnight munchies than the goat tostadas at RED ROOSTER. But the real gem at 310 Lenox Avenue is downstairs at Ginny’s, where celebrities go undercover, and everyone who is anyone meets for a potent cocktail and intoxicating music.

Here you have to think twice as to whether you may have had too much fun. Questioning, after all, is what life’s all about.

If today’s Harlem hotspots host even half the fun once had by the likes of Cab Calloway, Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, I can’t see a need to be anywhere else.

YOUR HARLEM

HOTSPOTS DIRECTORY Whether to make a reservation or order something delicious to go, you will want these additions to your database.

1. BARAWINE, 200 Lenox Avenue, New York, NY 10027, (646) 756-4154, Barawine.com, Brunch, Dinner, Wine.

2. THE CECIL, 210 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10026, (212) 866-1262, TheCecilHarlem.com, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner, Cocktails.

3. MINTON’S, 206 West 118th Street, New York, NY 10026, (212) 243-2222, MintonsHarlem.com, Dinner, Cocktails.

4. MAISON HARLEM, 341 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York, NY 10027, (212) 2229224, MaisonHarlem.com, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner.

6. RED ROOSTER HARLEM, 310 Lenox Avenue, between 125th and 126th Streets, Harlem, New York. (212) 792-9001, Breakfast, Brunch, Lunch, Dinner, Cocktails.

16 13. Eyes on the pies: Diners get their just deserts at the Red Rooster. 14. Restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson at the bar, where regulars roost nightly with a tasty red cocktail. 15. A tasty red cocktail. 16. The Rooster’s mac and greens.

HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW MAGAZINE PAGE 42

7. GINNY’S SUPPER CLUB, downstairs from the Red Rooster. (212) 421-3821, Dinner.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SUBJECTS

5. PARIS BLUES, 2021 Adam Clayton Powell Junior Blvd., New York, NY 10027, (917) 257-7831, Cocktails.

2014 HARLEM FINE ARTS SHOW

comes to

MARTHA’S VINEYARD August 7th through August 13th Come join the HFAS as we celebrate a week of art and entertainment on the island.

Art from the around the world will be on exhibition and for sale.

• 30 plus galleries and artists from the African Diaspora • A great opportunity for collectors • Meet and greet the artists and gallery owners • Free admission courtesy of BMW For additional information visit hfas.org or call 800.376.2860 Sponsored by BMW

M a l co l m C a m p b e l l d i d n ’ t ra ce fo r c a s h o r fa m e.

H e j u st wa n te d to g o fa ste r.

To g o b eyo n d my d re a m s , l i ke h e d i d .

Th at ’s my Wi l d R a b b i t .

N AS WHAT’S YOUR WILD RABBIT?

Never stop. Never settle.

Learn more about Malcolm Campbell at Hennessy.com

Since 1765

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